We Are All the Same in the Dark - Julia Heaberlin Page 0,84
matching dull brown, nonprescription contact lens in my good eye. Bunny asked what I wanted for my sixteenth birthday, and this was it: to be able to change the color of my eyes to something ordinary. She didn’t ask why because she knew.
She has reassured me I should never worry my father will find me by looking for green-eyed, one-eyed girls because I look so perfectly two-eyed. I didn’t want her to be worried, either, so I never said that I could pluck a green eye out of his face and put it in mine and you could not tell the difference. The point being, my father sees my eyes every day when he looks in the mirror. It’s a problem.
That was the fourth time I’d been back to my ocularist. It turned out the office where I first met him with Odette is only forty minutes from Bunny’s house in Oak Cliff. It was like God saw the need in advance.
My ocularist never asks why, either. Just what. What does the new eye feel like? What do I want painted in the corner this time? What do I think about what happened to Odette? What a terrible shame.
And please.
Please remember there is zero room for error with the eye you have left.
I place my suitcase on an old trunk at the foot of the bed. Odette’s plushy white cloud is calling to me again.
But I have work to do. I don’t want to disappoint Finn if he shows up again in the morning. I don’t want to be kicked out for not keeping our deal.
And something is in this house. I know I’m still high, but I feel it.
I grab a Coke and a protein bar from the kitchen and two U-Haul boxes and a handful of garbage bags from the garage.
The old man in the hall looks extra nasty today. I flip him off and start with the hall closet.
After twenty minutes, I decide that a night in jail might have been better than tackling this closet. At one point, I imagine there is a little man at the back pushing things through the wall as soon as I make more room.
“Come on,” I shout at him when I pull out a half-full bottle of Deerbuster Coyote Urine.
I fold old police uniforms and wool coats into boxes and garbage bags, and dutifully tug out every pocket and examine old receipts and mints. I sort change. I make a list, so if Finn ever cares to look at it before he trucks it off to Goodwill, he can.
Four umbrellas, a pellet gun, a Crock-Pot, and an old framed print of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. I check out the painting for a few minutes before wrapping it in newspaper. This painting always seemed a bit too high drama. I like Salvador Dalí’s version, with the Apostles’ faces hidden and the weird floating Jesus torso. It’s what I remember most about my senior class trip to Washington, D.C., the first place I ever traveled where people didn’t say y’all.
Also in the closet: a smashed ugly Santa shirt box, four large and cheap vases that I bet held funeral flowers, two Alabama license plates, hundreds of gun pellets spilled from a burst box. And scrapbook stuff, tossed in like salad. Letters, photos, a medal, childhood drawings signed with a crooked Odette. I stack anything sentimental and made of paper in the same pile.
I read through all of it, look at every picture and try to honor it. Odette with two pretty legs. Odette and what looks like a young Maggie, holding hands.
Family grouped around a picnic table, a Christmas tree, a birthday cake. Some full-dunk baptism shots taken in a lake or river, faces not clear enough to make out, that reminded me of home. The river that ran by my Oklahoma trailer park was filthy with washed-off sins.
In the end, I’m ruthless, like Finn asked. Except for the medal, which I place on the hall table, all the photos and letters go in the garbage bags. I shove both the boxes and bags into a corner of the living room, feeling like I wasted three good hours of Day Two. I temporarily stack the pennies and dimes and quarters from all the coat pockets on the coffee table.
This is definitely not what I’m here to do. Finn wants me distracted. I’m sure now. I bet he knows that what’s in this house is perfectly harmless and will lead nowhere.